My family is composed of seafood, through dinner the sea made manifest in our physical beings. For 10 years now, my wife, a Mainer through and through, and I have anchored our family and careers within the dynamic community of Freeport.
My decades-long championing of sustainable seafood has found homeport among the fishing and water-farming families we call neighbors. I’ve come to understand much about Maine: Our greatest natural resource is our work ethic, don’t honk unless you’re saying hello, and the currency that really matters here is how good of a neighbor you are.
As your neighbor, I’m thrilled to join the edible MAINE family, taking over from the great Colles Stowell, to share my musings on things salty, scaled, and shelled. In these pages, I invite you to cook along with me as I share thoughts on sustainability, the confluence of biology and biography, and how we sustain Place and thrive within it. The concept of sustainability can be complicated, but the action to achieve our goal is quite simple: Be a good neighbor. A delicious way to do this is to come together over a meal.
My love of seafood was fostered in my childhood spent near the Chesapeake. My personal mythology is authored in Proust-like memories of seaside meals and the people, places, and patterns in my experiences. All people have such a narrative that informs how we chart into new places, relationships, and roles. We share our mythologies through ritual, repeated actions that summon and replicate cherished experiences, interpreting our inner lives.
Wherever we first drafted ourselves, foundational to mythology is the template of a shared environment. But as we bear witness to our warming world, an undercurrent teases at the familiar patterns of the seasons, gaslighting our memories. As a result, we often sense in ourselves nostalgia—feeling homesick even though we are home.
The emotional antidote to change, fear, and loss is attention and affection, a Rosetta Stone to translate the unfamiliar. As Euell Gibbons wrote, “It is easy to lament good days passed, but let’s not mourn the best of times because we still live in them.”
So let’s find joy in our time by affectionately attending to the beauty and bounty we can sustain and share.
In our family we keep many rituals, from elaborate holiday meals to seasonal dishes to celebrate the expected arrival of seafood species. In winter, a Feast of the Seven Fishes beckons all to the table just as presents under the tree are magnets to our boys. In the early summer, swordfish migrate into our waters coinciding with the harvest of garlic scapes, both destined for the grill with nothing more than salt and a generous splash of olive oil. As our world changes, our ritual recipes might well evolve to meet the moment.
In New England, we are taught the mythology surrounding settler-America’s first heritage food: cod. It’s upon the backs of these fish that the colonies took their first steps toward political and economic freedom, the fish that made manifest the destiny of so many families. While the narrative of cod has been boon to bust, a proud fishery endures, and we bear responsibility to help sustain it by diversifying our demand.
Cod, too, has a family, all worthy of our culinary attentions. Cod is the lineal lead and the culinary benchmark from which other flaky white fish vary. Haddock: affable though tense, with a welcome sourness. Hake: svelte and yielding. Cusk: sturdy and athletic in texture. Pollock: bluish-cast and confident in flavor.
In fall, I delight in setting my attention to how cooling waters animate the culinary character of cod and kin. A slight acidity in the flesh meets the richness of fat and focuses flavor. I celebrate this liminal season, the lusty abundance of summer remaining as the harvest moon romances autumn’s hearty crops.
Allow me to set the scene: Garlic and butternut simmer in olive oil, nutty brown and sweetly aromatic. A spoonful of smoked sweet paprika lends sultry wisps of campfire; citrus adds verve. Simmered down with a splash of wine or water, then puréed, this becomes a cheerful sunset-hued sauce studded with toasted pistachios. Cod or kin sizzles in olive oil, gentle heat luring faint color to the surface. The fish, plated and swimming in sauce, gets a tuft of parsley, mint, cilantro, and scallion for a feathery and aromatic lift. A glass of chilled Beaujolais or a tropical-nosed Maine-brewed IPA provides a perfect pairing.
Won’t you join me? I look forward to the time we’ll spend together. Maybe I’ll see you one of these days somewhere along this ragged, jagged, delicious coast of Maine. Perhaps we’ll meet over filets at the fish market. In any case, I’ll see you here again in these pages.
